From secret laboratories to monumental infrastructures and the many landscapes of war, energy, and waste in between, nuclear power is at the core of a vast and radically understudied array of 20th c. architectures. Central to the most iconic architectural images of the post-war era while also rendered invisible in apparently unseen wastelands, atomic weapons, nuclear reactors, and atmospheric fallout eventually attracted intense architectural attention. Drawing on multiple literatures, the seminar explores how the nuclear penetrated beyond warscapes to enter even the private spaces of the domestic realm and the human body.

How do artworks and buildings allow us to interpret past and present methodologies of resistance? Can poems, music, and artifacts help us reconstruct these methods, along with the people and spaces that shaped them? What tools have architects and artists historically developed as part of resistance efforts, and what roles did these tools play in cultural, political, and religious forms of dissent? The course revisits these questions in the context of debates in modern architecture from Austria, Turkey, the Soviet Union, Japan, Chile, the United States and South Africa.

How do spatial configurations determine epistemological frameworks and vice versa? This class considers how notions of frames, fields, intervals, and gaps have shaped humanistic enquiry and art historical scholarship in particular. While highlighting case studies and implications for the study and historiography of modern and contemporary art, readings engage other subfields and disciplines, including philosophy, media studies, literary theory, and anti-colonial studies. Topics treated include field formation; reflexivity; interpretive models of surface and depth, the geopolitics of geometry; and issues of autonomy, liminality, and bordering.

This seminar offers a critical survey of recent trends in media theory with an eye to questions of aesthetic form and to systems of cultural production generally. Topics include cultural techniques, disability, media archaeology, elemental media, infrastructuralism and network theory, assemblage theory, biomedia, affect, and digital embodiment.

This seminar explores the intersections between Modern architecture and literature in three Latin American cities: Havana, Mexico City, Bogota. How were built environments inhabited and written by novelists and poets? How did architects respond to literary and cultural debates? Nicolas Arroyo, Mario Pani, Rogelio Salmona contributed to constructing a specific Latin American modernity, in dialogue with authors Alejo Carpentier, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Theoretical discussions include critical regionalism, gender and architecture, and environmental context.